On Let Me Tell You What I Mean

The essays in this book open with an insane first line:

The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Open City, and the East Village Other.

Such is Joan Didion’s breathtaking ability. I’d never read her before. She’s most famous for her novels, if I’m not mistaken, though the essays have gained their own traction, and Let Me Tell You What I Mean is her final collection, gathering work from the late 1960s to 2000 that had appeared in periodicals but never in a bound volume.

My first impression was how heavily Hemingway shaped her. I think “Hills Like White Elephants” was especially important to her — she mentions it in three or four of these essays — and there’s a whole piece, “Last Words,” on Hemingway and his legacy, written in response to the 1999 controversy over Scribner publishing a novel he’d never wanted published. It’s a delightful examination of literary legacy, privacy, and the choices around posthumous publication (another that should never have seen print is Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman), and she sides, of course, with Hemingway. Another unexpected deep dive is into Martha Stewart’s business, in “Everywoman.com.” Where other commentators claimed Stewart sold 1950s domesticity, Didion argues something quite different: that Stewart sells a rough, ragged, American individualist competence — the point isn’t that women can or should hone their kitchen and garden skills, but that Stewart means to foster an “I can do things too” in them. I have little love for Martha Stewart, and yet it’s impossible not to see her a little differently after this; her read on Nancy Reagan, in “Pretty Nancy,” is the exact opposite.

I was especially fond of the more personal essays — “Why I Write,” “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice,” “Telling Stories” — which open a window onto how Didion the writer became who she was: how much an instructor meant to her, how working at Vogue taught her to weigh every word and every clause, the specific experiences that shaped her. You don’t need to know her other work to step in here; it’s a fine introduction to a literary luminary, and especially rewarding for anyone fond of the essay.